Chaucer's General prologue and Wife of Bath's.
Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are about a group of pilgrims that are traveling to Canterbury to pay homage to St. Thomas Becket, ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, current martyr. Chaucer's pilgrims assemble at the Tabard Inn where the host of the inn, suggests that each pilgrim tell 2 tales each way on the pilgrimage "That ech of yow, to shorte with oure weye,In this viage shal telle tales tweye" (lines 791-792 General Prologue). There are 29 pilgrims, Pilgrim Chaucer and the Host. This assemblege of 31 pilgrims then would make for a total of 124 tales.
Chaucer creates a diverse collection of characters. The pilgrims represent a wide variety of occupations and class status. The three class stations in Chaucer's time were the clergy, the nobility and everybody else not in the first 2 groups. To wit in the Canterbury Tales we have a monk "A MONK ther was, a fair for the maistrie," (line 165 General Prologue) representing clergy, a knight " A KNYGHT ther was, and that a worthy man," (line 41 General Prologue) as nobility and a ordinary guy the miller "Ther was also a REVE, and a MILLERE," (line 542 General Prologue). The main narrator of the Tales is an ordinary guy named Chaucer who is also a pilgrim. The narrator lets the reader view the other pilgrims through his eyes. We also learn of their personalities through how they tell their tales and how other pilgrims relate to them.
The major characters in the General Prologue are the very people who soon will be telling their stories with other characters in them. Chaucer's description of each character tells us something about the character's personality, but that we'll also learn something more about the character based on the story he or she tells. (like the Wife of Bath's ). Chaucer tells us much about each pilgrim, not only by telling us what they do for a living, but also through description of their clothes, attitudes, even their bodies.
